The political use of ‘new’ media in the 2014 South African national election

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Daniël Malherbe

Thesis submitted according to the requirements for the degree of MA International Studies in the Faculty of Political Science

at Stellenbosch University

Supervisor: Prof. Pieter Fourie Co-Supervisor: Prof. Amanda Gouws

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Declaration

By submitting this thesis/dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any

qualification.

Date: November 2014

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Abstract

New media is seen as having a big impact on the way modern political parties run their campaigns during election periods.

This paper focuses on answering the question: How was new media used in the 2014 South African national election? It does this by creating a context regarding the understanding of what new media is, how it is used in politics, and what impact it has on electioneering and political campaign strategies. Three case studies, the Obama campaign and the 2014 Indian and Brazilian elections, are used to highlight how new media has impacted on elections.

This analysis is then framed into a set of criteria for success that is used to measure the chosen South African political parties against, to determine whether or not they used new media well in the 2014 South African national election. A set of criteria for success thus makes it possible to rank and assign points to each party and from those points determine whether that party used new media well or poorly. Each party is given a score out of 50.

The other 50 points were awarded based on a subjective view regarding the actual use of language and focused voter communication on new media platforms, specifically Twitter. This was done by looking at the insights garnered from the literature regarding electoral campaigning, South Africa’s demographic and geographic differences and seeing if the parties analysed in this study employed communication strategies to target these voter differences.

This study found that the parties identified, when measured against the set of criteria for success that was created and the subjective views of the way in which the parties communicated, did not use new media well in the 2014 South African national election. They failed in most cases, with the DA being the exception, to build the necessary online platforms or to communicate effectively through new media platforms. There was also too little focus on addressing voter apathy in the youth and there was a lack of targeted communication to specific social groups. Parties also failed to present themselves as a viable alternative to voters who did not already identify with a party or those who were looking for an alternative party.

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Opsomming

Nuwe media het ’n duidelike impak op die manier waarop moderne politieke partye en partyleiers hulle verkiesingsveldtogte bestuur.

Hierdie studie fokus daarom op die vraag: Hoe is nuwe media tydens die 2014 Suid-Afrikaanse nasionale verkiesing gebruik? Dit word gedoen deur konteks te gee aan wat nuwe media behels, hoe dit in die moderne politiek gebruik word, en wat die impak is wat nuwe media op verkiesings en verkiesingsveldtogte het. Drie gevallestudies, die Obama-veldtog, asook die 2014 verkiesings in Indië en Brasilië, word gebruik om spesifieke elemente oor die impak wat nuwe media op verkiesings het, uit te wys.

Die ontleding word dan gebruik om ’n kriteria-raamwerk te skep waarteen spesifieke Suid-Afrikaanse politieke partye se gebruik van sosiale media in die 2014 verkiesing gemeet word, om hulle sukses al dan nie daarmee te bepaal. Die sukseskriteria maak dit moontlik om politieke partye in ’n rangorde te plaas en punte aan hulle toe te ken. Die punte-telling, uit ’n totaal van 50, word dan gebruik om te bepaal waarom die partye sukses behaal het, of nie.

Nog 50 punte word toegeken op die basis van ’n subjektiewe oordeel oor taalgebruiken aanslag asook geteikende kieserskommunikasie op nuwe media platforms, meer spesifiek Twitter. Dit word gedoen deur insigte uit ’n studie van relevante literatuur oor die verkiesingveldtog, Suid-Afrika se demografiese en geografiese verskille asook om te oordeel of die partye wat in die studie bestudeer word kommunikasie strategieë benut het om die verskillende groeperings van kiesers te teiken.

Die studie bevind dat die spesifieke partye, gemeet teen die raamwerk vir kriteria vir sukses, sowel as die subjektiewe opinie oor taalgebruik en aanslag in kommunikasie, hulle sleg van hul taak gekwyt het in die 2014 nasionale verkiesing in Suid-Afrika. Hulle het in meeste gevalle, met die DA as ’n uitsondering, nie geslaag om die nodige digitale-platforms te vestig en om suksesvol deur die nuwe media platforms te kommunikeer nie. Hulle het ook nie geslaag om die apatie van die Suid-Afrikaanse jeug aan te spreek nie en daar was ’n gebrek aan geteikende en relevante kommunikasie met spesifieke sosiale groepe. Die partye het ook nie daarin geslaag om die kiesers wat partyloos is, of van party wil verander, ’n beter opsie te bied nie.

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Chapter 1 – Introduction

During the past two decades there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people using new media platforms (blogs, websites, podcasts) and social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest), which are collectively known as “Web 2.0” (Barr, 2014). This growth has impacted directly on the way political campaigns are run and how politicians communicate with their electorate (Fulton, 2013).

The term “Web 2.0” was reportedly coined by Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly in collaboration with Media Live International in 2004 when they referred to the second generation of Internet-based services that have those key attributes that allow openness for collaboration and make a high level of interactivity between users on the Internet possible without requiring them to have any programming skills.

The term ‘new media’ is also one that has become popular in contemporary society, but it has many definitions and versions, and can be recognised as problematic. For the purpose of this study Macnamara’s (2011) definition will be used:

[New media] is used in varying ways along with other terms to denote emergent digital media and Internet media. It is a common term in current debate and refers to the range of one-to-one and one-to-many communication applications operating via the Internet including email, chat rooms, newsgroups, websites, blogs, wikis and social networking sites, such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The term ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ media is used in this paper to represent newspapers, print magazines, radio and television.

This growth in the number of Internet users and consumers of new media led Arianna Huffington, the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, as quoted in Wired magazine after the United States presidential election in 2008 that Barack Obama won, to say: “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee” (Schiffman, 2008).

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The Internet, with the use of new media on it, has become a powerful, unregulated platform that has the potential to send a message instantly and reach millions of users with it. Because of this power political parties have adapted their communication and campaign strategies to acquire as many followers, likes and shares as they can to ensure that their campaign messages are amplified by as large a base as possible – thus increasing their chances of winning in an election.

This immediacy, from a message being sent to its reaching millions of followers, means that there is no pause between error and consequence. A scandal, a betrayal or a failure is as quickly spread and shared and can have a dire impact on a politician, a party or a government, as seen in the example of the American politician Anthony Weiner who sent explicit pictures of himself via his cell phone which went public and forced him to resign (Huffington Post Online, 2014).

This reality means that any political party in contemporary politics needs to have not only these new media platforms at its disposal but also a very active new media and social media strategy in place to ensure that good news is amplified and bad news suppressed.

This dramatic shift in parties’ campaign strategies and execution that has been seen in the United States (Williams and Gulati, 2008) has also been witnessed in other developed countries such as Australia (Barr, 2014 and Macnamara, 2008), as well as developing countries, where new and social media are also starting to play, and in some cases already play, a pivotal role in politics.

In countries like Brazil, according to bizcommunity.com (Durrant, 2014): “Opposition parties are capitalising on the television deficit by making friends on Facebook […because] nearly 80% of Brazilians aged 16 to 25 use the Internet at least once a week and almost half go online daily.”

In Brazil and India politicians are also taking courses and appointing staff to run political campaigns in the same way Obama ran his 2008 campaign. The Washington

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tactics in crucial election” and The Economist in March of 2014, reporting on the campaign strategies of the top Brazilian candidates, states that:

[because] politicians now want to harness social networks for their election campaigns […] social networks [such as Facebook and Twitter] offer counsel on how to ‘do an Obama’, in the words of Emmanuel Evita of Twitter, referring to Barack Obama’s astute use of social media in the 2008 presidential race in the United States (The Economist Online, 2014 and Gowen, 2014).

In India over the past few years more than 150 million citizens between the ages of 18 and 23 have become eligible to vote, making 75% of the voting population under the age of 35 (Mallet, 2014 and Mckenzie, 2014). The strong growth in the number of eligible voting youth and the massive growth of the online audience in India has led the online site, Quartz, to brand the 2014 Indian election the “Twitter election”, a term it picked up from Twitter’s India head Rishi Jaitly, who after seeing the massive growth in the use of Twitter as a communication platform during the election dubbed the 2014 Indian election the “Twitter election” (Merelli, 2014).

The motivation behind politicians’ willingness to use and engage online is not only due to their wanting to grow their support bases, but is also because they know that the Internet is being used as a tool by many other persons to increase offline participation in gatherings such as music events or rallies, or even sometimes riots, that have large consequences in the political and social lives of countries: for example, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Anonymous organisation that regularly acts against companies and people who they believe have wronged society.

It is thus undeniable that the Internet, and social media platforms on it, have energised and strengthened activism, allowing activists to group together by providing channels of communication and tools for quick exchange of ideas, group creation, and protest assemblies arrangement.

Wired magazine in January of 2012 ran an article on the riots of 2011 called “#riot –

how social media fuels social unrest” by Bill Wasik (2011). This extract from their timeline illustrates the impact social media has had on the private and public space:

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January 14: Tunis, Tunisia – Sustained protests oust president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

January 25: Cairo, Egypt – Thousands of demonstrators fill Tahrir Square. February 3: Sana, Yemen – Some 20 000 people gather for a “day of rage”. February 14: Bahrain – Protestors clash with security forces; at least 44 people

are killed in the ensuing months.

February 16: Philadelphia – A “flash” snowball fight turn into a near-riot; 14 high schoolers are arrested.

February 17: Libya – Snipers fire on protestors in what ultimately becomes a month-long civil war.

February 20: Morocco – Nearly 40 000 people in 57 towns rail against the government.

February 20: China – The “Jasmine revolution” is quelled when authorities throttle cell phone services.

February 23: Athens – Up to 100 000 revolt against pay and pension cuts.

April 16: Venice Beach, California – A tweet draws a flash mob to the boardwalk. Gunfire critically wounds one man, and hundreds flee. May 30: Boston – Responding to Facebook invites, hundreds of kids show

up at a late-night beach party; a SWAT team is called.

June 4: Shaker Heights, Ohio – After calls to action online (“Shakers gone shake”), hundreds of teens converge on a fireworks show, provoking skirmishes.

July 15: Syria – Up to one million people clash with police across the country; several are killed.

August 6: Tottenham, UK – A march on a police station leads to a night of arson and destruction.

August 7: Enfield, UK – A message calling on readers to “link up and cause havoc” sparks looting in Enfield Town.

August 9: Liverpool, UK – “That’s my car on fire,” someone tweets. Several other vehicles and buildings are set ablaze as rioting spreads.

August 15: San Francisco – Anonymous hacks the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s website, calling on protestors to mass; hundreds of participants shut down four subway stations.

September 3: Israel – At least 300 000 people march nationwide against income inequality.

September 17: New York City – Day one of Occupy Wall Street brings around 1 000 people to Manhattan’s financial district for a march.

October 1: New York City – More than 700 people are arrested attempting to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.

October 6: Multiple locations, US – Four thousand people assemble in Portland, Oregon; occupations continue in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.

October 15: Worldwide – From Tokyo to Zurich, millions protest in 80-plus countries during the Global Day of Rage.

October 20: Sirte, Libya – After months of fighting, Libya celebrates the death of Muammar Qaddafi.

October 25: Oakland, California – An Iraq War veteran is critically injured as police crack down on an Occupy encampment.

November 6: Washington, DC – About 10 000 people surround the White House to protest a proposed oil pipeline from Canadian tar sands to US

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The quote from Cameron Bird that ran with this article summarises the events as follows: “From January, when a dictator fell in the Middle East, to autumn, when protesters settled into American cities, 2011 was a year of marches, mobs and omnipresent occupations” (Wasik, 2011).

This article from Wired magazine serves to demonstrate the impact of the Internet and new media and the potential they have to influence society: where they can either promote an individual’s chance for office, if used effectively, or negatively influence the political structure of an entire country. In the paper, Opening Closed Regimes (Howard, 2011), the authors write that the evidence gathered regarding the role social media played in shaping political debate in the Arab Spring shows that social media was heavily used to conduct political conversations. This active online group made it possible for them to see that a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. The demographic profile of the individuals most active on these platforms was young, urban and relatively well educated – and many of them were women.

The impact of new media has not only been to amplify the political campaigns and messages of political candidates, but also to shine a spotlight on corruption and inequality. This means that in the developed world, where Internet penetration is high and access to information is seamless, political parties have to become very transparent and clear about their message and goals to ensure that they are not burned at the stake by their own followers.

Traditional media gives voice to these movements, but the kick-off steps and their activity are continued and organised on websites and on social media. Curran states that “the Internet is a very effective mode of communication between activists”, linking them together, facilitating interaction, and mobilizing them to one place in short notice (Curran, 2013:14-15).

This trend towards using new and social media from the electorate as well as from the political parties’ side, and especially its use in political campaign strategies, has only been implemented in recent elections in the developing countries; and in many

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countries political parties are still tentative about using new media as a primary communication tool. This is mostly due to the audiences’ only recently reaching a valuable size and with that a rise in demand to communicate with them.

In the previous national election in 2009 in South Africa, new media did not have a strong influence, as Marion Walton (Walton and Donner, 2011) writes:

…[an] analysis of the 2009 elections suggests that these mobile social networks did not facilitate political (at least electoral) communication, either between counter publics and a local mediatised public sphere or globally with other networked publics. They did thus not allow for broader contestation or for deliberation.

There has, however, been strong growth in broadband connectivity and access to the Internet in South African since 2009 and this study investigates how this growth and thus access to a new audience was incorporated into the parties’ campaign strategies with the aim of seeing how new media – and specifically the social media platform Twitter – was used in the 2014 South African national election. This will help us to determine how and what the South African political parties are communicating online; whether they are communicating at all; and whether or not they have used new media well.

Research Problem

The South African academic and lecturer at the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Jane Duncan, wrote in the book

South African Election 2014 (Duncan, 2014:153):

…when it came to using online and social media – which should have given the parties space to make their voices heard in an unmediated fashion – the tendency was to use these media to broadcast existing electoral messages rather than interact with existing potential supporters.

She goes on to explain that many of the political parties that were active in the 2014 South African national election did not make effective use, if indeed they made any use at all, of the power of social media and this resulted in their “reproducing

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weaknesses from their analogue strategies in their digital strategies too” (Duncan, 2014:153).

There is, however, very little information available that explains what strategy each political party in the 2014 South African national election used. It is thus very difficult to determine whether or not the political parties are improving in the way they use new media and social media, and why Duncan believes that they used it poorly.

This study thus determines to what degree new media and social media were used by the main political parties and their candidates in the 2014 South African national election, and analyses how these parties and their candidates communicated on these platforms and whether this communication was in line with what they were communicating on other platforms. Finally, the study identifies who the parties seemed to target and who they actually reached on Twitter.

Research Question

The research questions that this study will attempt to answer are the following: • How was new media used in the 2014 South African national election? Sub-questions supporting this primary research question include the following:

• Which parties and key role players used new media in the 2014 South African election?

• How was new media used; and at whom was it directed?

• What is the relationship between South African political parties’ manifestos and the content these parties used in their new media platforms?

• What should political parties in South Africa do to ensure that they have a successful new media following?

The existing body of literature about the use of new media in political campaigns is used as a base from which a comparison between the parties in the dataset collected during the 2014 South African national election is drawn. From that comparison it is determined how new media was used.

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The current body of work on campaigning and the use of new media that is available focuses heavily on the developed economies, specifically the United States, and to a lesser degree on the developing countries of Brazil and India.

Examining how these countries’ political parties used new media in comparison with the methods employed in the 2014 national election in South Africa will give us a better understanding of the effectiveness of South Africa’s political party approaches.

Research Design and Methods: Descriptive, Quantitative Study

The overall method applied in this study will be quantitative, looking at the how and not the why or the what. The Practice of Social Research (Babbie, 2010:52) breaks down the basic procedure for a quantitative study into four steps:

1. The construction of the image of the concept 2. The specification of dimensions

3. The selection of observable indicators

4. Combining the observable indicators and the dataset to answer the research question, which in this case is: Was new media used well or not in the 2014 national election in South Africa?

The first step is the construction of the image of the concept: this is where the research question is formulated and the parameters are set to determine how the research question will be answered. For this to be done there has to be a set context or framework in which to place the concept. The literature study in this paper creates that framework from which an understanding can grow of how new media was used in other examples in the world, and importantly, why it has become necessary to look at how new media is being used during elections.

The second step that is required is the specification of dimensions: this refers to the selection of data and the motivation for choosing that specific data. In the case of this study the data that forms the base of the argument has been extracted from the online

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social media platform Twitter. The data was extracted from the Twitter platform for a period of four months and two weeks, from 1 February 2014 until 12 May 2014, which gave us over one million Twitter messages, tweets, to work with. The data harvested was chosen because it possessed one of the pre-defined characteristics. This means that before any tweet was saved to the database it was confirmed that the tweet adhered to the rules that were set in place.

Three basic rules were set up. The first one was: Does this tweet originate from one of our pre-selected political parties? Because the research looked at how new media was used during the 2014 South African national election, only the top political parties that were on the Twitter platform were selected. They were Agang, which is the new political party that was founded by Mamphela Ramphele. The African National Congress (ANC), the ruling political party in South Africa. The Congress of the People (COPE), which is one of the top news-making opposition parties and which was formed before the 1999 election. The Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition party in South Africa. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which is also a new party that was founded by the news-making former ANC Youth Leader, Julius Malema. As well as the Patriotic Alliance, a new party that was formed before the 2014 election by the well-known businessman, Kenny Kunene.

If the tweet did not fall into the first category it was moved to the second category: Does this tweet originate from one of the pre-selected top party leaders? They were Helen Zille, the DA’s party leader and the premier of the Western Cape; Julius Malema, the EFF party leader; Mosiuoa Lekota, COPE’s party leader; Jacob Zuma, the ANC party leader and the president of South Africa; and Mamphela Ramphele, the party leader of Agang.

The final category was: Does this tweet mention either by full name, for example, Helen Zille; or directly address, for example, @helenzille; or any of the pre-selected candidates or parties. If it did the tweet was captured and added to the database. This means that what the political parties and their top candidates posted is visible; also what the members of the public posted about them; as well as what the response was from the members of the public to each tweet that was sent. This is possible

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because of the way the communication in Twitter works, where tweets are ‘retweeted’. This means the message is shared by any profile on Twitter without adding or removing anything from the original tweet; ‘quoted’, which is where the person quotes, in full or part, the original tweet and then adds their own words; and finally a tweet made a ‘favourite’ by anyone on Twitter. This means that that tweet will stay visible as a list of tweets that a person has earmarked as something that they want to read again later and has more value personally to the user.

The Twitter platform allows for any member of the public to send out a message, but all messages are limited to 140 characters (letter or numbers), and anyone on Twitter can read any tweet that is posted. This means that with the right software in place the entire Twitter database can be harvested to provide a dataset that is readable and trustworthy. The profiles of each of the parties and candidates mentioned above were tracked for the four months before the 2014 South African national election and for a period of two weeks after the election. The tweets were taken from anyone on Twitter, so tweets that originated from outside of South Africa were not excluded. It is also important to note that all of the tweets that were collected still have their original website links so it is possible to go back to the original tweet to verify that the tweets used in this database are real and not altered.

A limitation of this sample is that it does rely heavily on the data that was collected through the Twitter platform. This means that there are other places online that could present alternative insights and arguments that have not been picked up by this study. All of the tweets that were not made in English were also disregarded, and they have been removed from the study. This could have an impact on the representation of some of the parties, but this impact is marginal due to the high volume of English tweets that were counted compared to the very low number of other language tweets that were collected.

It is important to mention that the reason why Twitter was used is because it has a large audience in South African and is the only platform that has a publicly accessible

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application programming interface (API)1 that can be efficiently mined and accurately segmented for a study of this nature. Facebook, for example, does not make its users’ information available to be mined in the same way Twitter does. This means that it is not possible to extract the same quality or quantity of information as that which has been extracted from Twitter. Facebook’s user behaviour is also not as readily available to the public. There is no other social media platform with the same audience size in South Africa that can be tracked with the same degree of accuracy. The data was extracted by the data mining company, Fuseware. They used Twitter’s API to extract the information into a database. As mentioned above, with the Twitter API, Fuseware could gather information by asking Twitter to give us specific data on a user by asking questions such as: “When anyone on Twitter tweets @da_news, then save the following information on the database: Name of person that sent the tweet, the actual tweet they sent, their location if it is defined, the time they sent the tweet, was it an organisation or individual, and the gender of the person if it is defined.” Sentiment analysis was also used, which was also done by Fuseware, where natural language algorithms pick up on predefined keywords and combinations of words to determine whether the term is overtly negative or positive. If the term did not contain a specific marker, such “good”, “bad”, “useless” then it was categorised as neutral. Most posts on Twitter are deemed neutral, because they are not actively for or against, but rather share a information or facts. They did make use of machine learning algorithms to improve the success rate of the semantic algorithms, but even with this, these algorithms still needed some work to improve their efficacy. However, for the purposes of this study they give us an insight into how the general populace felt regarding a topic, political party or person.

The third step that is required for a quantitative study is the selection of observable indicators. This means that there has to be a defined framework that can be used as a scale to measure the data that was collected. In the case of this study, it measured whether new media was well or poorly used in South Africa’s 2014 national election

1_{In computer programming, an application-programming interface (API) specifies a software component in terms}

of its operations, their inputs and outputs and underlying types. Its main purpose is to define a set of functionalities that are independent of their respective implementation, allowing both definition and implementation to vary

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by looking at how other countries have used new media and distilling a number of best practices to compare the dataset against.

The final step that is required is to combine the observable indicators and the dataset to determine whether the research question that was formulated was answered. This was done in the data analysis chapter in this study where the framework from the literature review was used to ascertain whether or not new media was used well in the South African national election in 2014.

Ethics

The information that is used in this paper was collected and supplied ethically.

The Twitter data collected for this study was supplied and verified by the data and research company Fuseware. Fuseware is a market leader in online media monitoring, and provides a precise understanding of the online market, competitive climate and consumer insights around digital brands (Reporter, 2014). The data collection that Fuseware did was requested by the South African company Media24, to use in a business document which was never completed.

The author of this paper was an employee of Media24 and that is how I became aware of the dataset. I have since left Media24 to start my own company, but was given access to this dataset by Media24 after they decided not to use it in their business plan and saw no further use for it. My leaving after being given consent to use the dataset has not impacted on their willingness to provide the dataset as a basis for the work in this thesis.

I have been given written consent by Media24 as well as Fuseware to make use of this dataset and publish the findings publicly.

The use of Twitter information is also covered by Twitter policy documentation which every person that joins Twitter has to sign. In this document on their website (twitter.com, 2014) they state the following:

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Tweets, Following, Lists and other Public Information: Our Services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide us is information you are asking us to make public. This includes not only the messages you Tweet and the metadata provided with Tweets, such as when you Tweeted, but also the lists you create, the people you follow, the Tweets you mark as favorites or Retweet, and many other bits of information that result from your use of the Services. We may use this information to customize the content we show you, including ads. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide public for as long as you do not delete it from Twitter, but we generally give you settings to make the information more private if you want. Our Services broadly and instantly disseminate your public information to a wide range of users, customers, and services. For instance, your public user profile information and public Tweets are immediately delivered via SMS and our APIs to our partners and other third parties, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate Twitter content into their services, and institutions such as universities and public health agencies that analyze the information for trends and insights. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.

From this it can clearly be seen that all users have given full, public right to the use of their names, tweets and any other listed information.

Outline of Chapters

Chapter 2 presents a literature review of new media and politics. This chapter highlights key authors on the subject, as well as comments and critiques regarding new media and politics. This chapter will go on to discuss how new media has developed over the past few years and highlight the key discussions surrounding this field of study. This chapter will also look at the political science literature around the subject of the use of old and new media in electioneering and provide, through the case studies from the United States, Brazil and India, a foundation to use to determine what success looks like when one examines how new media was used in South Africa’s national election in 2014.

Chapter 3 looks at the history of new media in South Africa and elaborates on the use of new media in the 2009 national election in South Africa. This will serve as a contextual backdrop to Chapter 4.

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Chapter 4 analyses and links the discussions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. This analysis will be complemented with inputs and quotes from the data drawn during the 2014 South African national election. It will also incorporate the political parties’ manifestos as an additional source to determine the way in which political parties communicate externally.

In Chapter 5 the insights garnered from the case studies and the criteria for successful use of new media established in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 will be weighed against the analysis of how new media was used in the 2014 South Africa national election to establish whether the political parties and key political players used new media effectively or not.

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Chapter 2 - Literature Study

As seen in the introduction to Chapter 1, the research problem states that there is too little information regarding how political parties and party leaders used new media in the 2014 national election in South Africa. And that in the past few years there has been strong growth in the number of people who have access to the Internet and are active on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook; and that this has had an impact on the way political parties engage with their electorate during campaign periods. This has led us to seek an answer to the research question on how new media was used in the 2014 South African national election.

To review the literature available regarding the subject of how new media is being used in politics – and specifically elections – this chapter has been divided into six clusters. The first cluster examines the chronology of old and new media in general and the second cluster analyses how the development of new media has generally been looked at in the context of politics and government. The third cluster delves into how new media has been discussed in the field of electioneering. Here we highlight the role new media has played and how it is being used in electioneering; what the literature says regarding its use and how it foresees its use in future campaigns. The last three clusters are case studies, where it is asked: How is new media being used and what is being said about its use in the cases of the United States, where the 2009 presidential campaign by Barack Obama will form a large part of the literature; Brazil, where the 2014 election is currently (October, 2014) taking place; and India where the 2014 election was seen as the first election where new media was used successfully.

Finally, this literature study and analysis of how new media was used in the United States, Brazil and India gives us a lens through which the data that was gathered can be seen with greater clarity and then analysed to determine whether or not new media was used successfully in the 2014 national election in South Africa.

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New Media and Politics

This paper looks at how new media was used in the 2014 South African national election. To accurately understand how new media is used in society in a general sense there needs to be an understanding of how the dialogue around the topic of new media has developed in the field of political science. After that a deeper understanding into how new media is being used in the field of electioneering can be reached.

The academic Thomas Keenan’s personal interaction with new media, quoted below, is a good place to start when the topic of new media’s impact on society in general is discussed:

When I explore the web, I follow the cursor, a tangible sign of presence implying movement. This motion structures a sense of liveliness, of immediacy, of the now. I open up my “personalised” site at MSNBC: via “instant” traffic maps (which, the copy tells me, “agree within a minute or two” to real time), synopses of “current” weather conditions, and individualized news bits, the Web site repeatedly foregrounds its currency, its timeliness, its relevance to me. A frequently changing tickertape scroll bar updates both headlines and stock quotes, and a flashing target floats on my desktop, signalling “breaking news” whenever my PC’s on, whether or not a Web browser is open. The numerous polls or surveys that dot MSNBC’s electronic landscape (they’re called “live votes”) promise that I can impact news in an instant; I get the results right away, no need to wait for the 10 p.m. broadcast. Just click. Immediate gratification. (Chun and Keenan, 2006:201) From this the understanding begins to form that with new media, and the Internet as a vehicle through which the new media content is sent and accessed, be that on a website or on a social media platform, solutions are being created that address just about every need a person can have. These online platforms are also created and designed to deliver these solutions, through the online social interaction that people have with each other on social media platforms, and spreads them immediately by using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.

Websites and social media platforms have created a sort of knowledge and information democratisation, transforming people who were once only receivers of information and content into content producers and creators. The speed and ease with

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which content is created and shared in today’s world was not a possibility fifteen years ago when the web was still a very difficult place to navigate and access was still limited.

Bokor (2014), taking from Pavlik and McIntosh (2011:68), explains that this has created a fundamental shift in society, moving from old media to new media, where a dramatic change has come with how content is received, as opposed to sent: “The types of media classified as traditional or old media are analog, where the modulation of the sound carrier is analogous to the fluctuations of the sound itself.”

The analogue, a single signal medium of old media, be that print, TV or radio, has been taken and made digital, where the way it is received and reviewed by the consumer has changed. Yet in many cases the original content creation process is still the same. Bokor (2014) goes on to explain:

These [old] media afford a unidirectional model of information flow from the producers of the media content to the receiver or audience (which is often large, heterogeneous, and anonymous). This one-way communication flow constrains the receiver because by their very nature, these media are largely centralized and lack facilities by which members of the audience can communicate with each other or with the creators/publishers of the media content. Examples of these media include print (e.g., newspapers, magazines, etc.) and electronic (radio, TV, telegraphy, telephony, movies, facsimile, photography, etc.). Jenkins (2008) and Williams (2003) explain that in the age of digitized media, the traditional media are moving from their analog base to the digital world (using the Internet) for their products to reach a global audience; but they still retain much of what makes them traditional.

This move from old media to new media that can be consumed, reviewed, shared and interacted with on a global scale is called “Web 2.0”; and this term describes what is known as the second generation of the Internet which focuses on the website users’ ability to collaborate and share information online. This Web 2.0 is named as such because it is the upgrade to the Internet, which brings the Internet to a higher level, where information and content are now made plastic and mutable, open-ended and infinitely adaptable (Eder, 2012).

The Internet has moved away from being owned by single media companies that drive content and information. In a 2006 speech Rupert Murdoch (Chadwick and Howard,

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2010) reflected on how “Power is moving away from those who own and manage the media to a new and demanding generation of consumers – consumers who are better educated, unwilling to be led”. P. Eder (2012) writes that, at the beginning of 2009, of the 50 most popular websites in the world, when you look at how many people visit these websites in a month, 24 were user driven, meaning that the content one could consume on them was created by other members of the public, and not editors or writers. As Napoli (2008) argues:

The communications dynamics reflected in Web 2.0 (see Mabillot, 2007) applications such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr are increasingly foregrounding an approach to mass communication in which the individual audience member operates on nearly equal footing with the more traditional institutional communicator. As Benkler (2006) and others have demonstrated, the new media environment is one in which the tools of participation in public discourse and creative activity are much more widely distributed (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Jenkins, 2004; Kendall, 2008; Mabillot, 2007). Mass communication is now a much more egalitarian process, in which the masses can now communicate to the masses (Fonio, et al., 2007).

These are websites such as Wikipedia, which in one year went from 270 articles to 19 700, all content created and verified by members of the public. The other user-generated websites are the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, where a user can upload nearly any content he or she wants and have it shared with their friends, followers or any member of the public that is interested. Social network’s value was first seen in 2003 when a website, Friendster, was launched and grew from 800 000 members to over two million members in just two months. Eder goes on to explain that of the remaining 26 websites, sixteen were merely portal or search sites that link users to other sites, such as Google.com, and that only ten of the 50 top websites were what should be considered “one-to-many, non-user driven sites such as cnn.com or Microsoft.com” (Eder, 2012).

This change from a web experience that was still unidirectional to the shared open platform that was created by Web 2.0 has had a huge impact not only on the media world but also on businesses, marketing, and legal practices. Casey and Savastinuk (2007) explain:

New business models have sprung from such companies as Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, eBay and Apple’s iTunes, and the term Web 2.0 has been used to

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describe some of these companies and their business models […] companies and their Web sites have become more open and interactive, allowing user input and customization and adopting a more open attitude toward information sharing through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs). Content, or information, has become less centralized and isolated.

Music and movies are now purchased through digital channels with millions of downloads and sales happening online daily. Creators and consumers of niche content have exploded entrepreneurial launches into huge viable markets. The Apple iTunes Store has become the world’s largest music retailer, and Netflix has radically changed the distribution of rental movies. From online gaming (witness the success of World

of Warcraft) to gambling, the interactive dynamic works to produce increasingly

sophisticated and ever more finely tuned content. This new era of unlimited choice is expanding demand and challenging original ownership rules (Eder, 2012).

Flew (2008) stated that “as a result of the evolution of new media technologies, globalization occurs”. Globalisation is generally explained as “more than expansion of activities beyond the boundaries of particular nation states”. Globalisation shortens the distance between people all over the world through electronic communication (Flew 2008); and Cairncross (1998) expresses this great development as the “death of distance”. New media “radically break the connection between physical place and social place, making physical location much less significant for our social relationships” (Croteau and Hoynes 2003:311).

The writer Castells holds an equally optimistic view on the impact of the Internet on government and politics:

The history of life, as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era… [At] the end of the twentieth century, we are living through one of these rare intervals in history. An interval characterised by transformation of our ‘material culture’ by the works of a new technological paradigm organised around information technologies (Castells 1997:29). The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media.

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Use of new media for political communication has been studied by many scholars and organisations including Fallows (2000); Jones (1994, 1997); Livingstone (1999); McChesney (1999, 2000); Pool (1983); and Schneider (1996), to name but a few. However, the evolution of Web 2.0 Internet applications, rapidly expanding broadband, declining cost of personal computers and Internet access, development of intelligent search engines which make finding information on the Internet faster and easier, and possibly increasing user familiarisation with Internet use, have overtaken many findings of most pre-2000 research and even much research conducted in the early 2000s. Many of the new media currently in use were ‘invented’ or began to achieve widespread use post-2004: for example, YouTube, which was launched in February 2005.

It is thus important to note that when the body of literature that exists on the topic of new media and its political use is examined, and when we take into account how quickly Internet based media, or web media, became an integral part of contemporary society and discourse, it is clear that the conversation developed very rapidly over a relatively short period of time.

When the origin of the term ‘new media’ is investigated, it is interesting to note that by the mid-1990s it had become the de facto term for online content. It first usurped the place of “multi-media” in the fields of business and art, and then spread to cover all fields.

Chun and Keenan (2006:1) comments:

Unlike its predecessor, the term ‘new media’ was not accommodating in that it could be used in traditional media as well as new media terms: it portrayed other media as old or dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favour of a happy if redundant plurality. The singular plurality of the phrase stemmed from its negative definition: it was not mass media, specifically television. It was fluid, individualized connectivity, a medium to distribute control and freedom. Although new media depended heavily on computerization, new was not simply ‘digital media’: that is, it was not digitized forms of other media (photography, video, text), but rather an interactive medium or form of distribution as independent as the information it relayed.

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The term new media, however, only became popular after a conference in 2005 where the term “Web 2.0” was used. This conference greatly amplified the attention paid to the conversation surrounding the future of e-government and the role social media, new media and online communication would play. But this conversation was already quite active in smaller circles by 1999 with authors such as Damian Tambini writing a well cited paper for the New Media and Society publication New Media and

Democracy: The Civic Networking Movement, in which he noted a visible move away

from known traditional media forms such as newspapers, radio and television, towards the new media space of the Internet, multimedia and computer-mediated communication. This was a big stand to take when the impact of new media and digital was still limited.

Tambini (1999) called this movement “the third sphere”. In this sphere, it is explained that communication is unbound from the state and from commerce and that this is a place where free public deliberation can happen. Tambini also pointed to the rise of new independent people creating digital networks by building web pages for local businesses and local initiatives as the creation of a separate, removed community that could discuss any subject without state restriction or involvement. This new sphere of thinking, one that was hard to envisage fourteen years ago, is now a given in modern society.

What Tambini was witnessing was the beginning of the web as it is known today, and it is important to note that he accurately predicted then that this new form of communication would be successful because it supported the human need for social interaction, where “we have moved away from a monologue (one to many) into social dialogues (many to many)” (Tambini, 1999).

This is a very important insight, from a political perspective, because it touches on the reality that the communication strategy that is used by political parties would need to change and adapt to fit into this new manner of discourse. Tambini was also correct in predicting the success of social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where the communication that is generated is ‘many to many’.

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The term ‘new media’ is, however, much older than Tambini’s article and has been used since the 1960s, where it rose and fell with the dotcom mania, cyberspace, and interactive television.

In fact the relation between online communication and politics has been studied by several authors: to name a few, Wilhelm (2000), Norris (2001), Bennett and Entman (2001), Shane (2004), Hindman (2009), Dahlgren (2001, 2009, 2013), Mossberger et al (2012), Coleman and Blumler (2009), who all tried to state the importance and limitations of the Internet and attempted to further deepen the understanding of how the relation between citizens and political actors would play out in the future.

The main concerns many of these early researchers had when they examined the impact the Internet and new media could have on society, was with how citizens’ information would be used, what their participation and engagement in political life and debate would be, and how the communication between political actors and citizens would be managed.

With many of the early researches there was quite a degree of optimism and they presented the Internet as a tool that would motivate and deepen the relationship between citizens and politicians. This optimism changed, however, as most of the later researchers began to focus their attention instead on the loss of control the government would have over information, the lack of citizens’ interest in general politics, and the remaining inequality of access to the Internet and thus also lack of access to political information many users still faced.

Writers such as Graham Murdock and Peter Golding, for example, were much more cautious and had a limited set of expectations about the implications of the Internet and through it new media.

This is evident in Graham Murdock and Peter Golding’s (1989) work where they pointed out that when they looked at what was being developed then, they saw more market oriented communication and information systems. This meant for them that even though the public would have access to a new and large space where they could make more liberated choices about their lives, and exercise control in ways that would

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be both liberating and empowering, this new liberated space and the promise it held would only be realised if commercial forces could be held at bay. This was something that Murdock and Golding’s critical perspective, grounded in political economy, convincingly argued that it could not foresee as possible.

They believed that the systems that were being developed for the online communities would remain in the control of the large corporations and government: meaning that even though the consumer would be able to access the data at a much faster pace, the quality of the data would always be tainted by the sources that sent it out and owned it.

This argument of commercial intervention from Murdock and Golding led writers such as William Melody (1989:29) to raise the important question about how one would define what is and what is not ‘public interest’ when information societies are governed principally by market forces:

…to begin the process of redefining the public interest in the information society, it is necessary to return to the essential functions of information and communication in modern participatory democracy, that is, to provide opportunities for citizens to be informed and to be heard.

Melody argued that in a modern democracy the right of a citizen is to be informed and heard, which meant that even if the commercial powers ‘owned’ the information and communication on the Internet, they should not be allowed to alter it according to their personal benefit, if it negatively affected a citizen’s rights.

This question fell in step with the thinking of the day where the fear was that liable third parties such as editors at established media companies would not be responsible for controlling new media, and that this could lead to dangerous information being fed to the public, which could cause confusion and civil breakdown.

In 1992 Andrew Feenberg wrote:

Individuals who are incorporated into new types of technical networks have learned to resist through the net itself in order to influence the powers that control it. This is not a contest for wealth or administrative power, but a

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struggle to subvert the technical practices, procedures, and designs structuring everyday life (Feenberg, 1992:319).

His fear was that through this uncontrolled online medium, citizens would be able to undermine the authority of the state; and that the state would then become a body that would be in opposition to the thinking of the online community and would thus have to be undermined.

Melody, Golding, Murdock and Feenberg’s hesitant views on the power of new media in information systems and their argument that it would cause an unbalanced feed of information that would negatively affect the individual were not, however, shared by all.

Guthrie and Dutton’s (1992) analysis of how new media and politics could impact on each other serves as an example of how speculative and idealistic many of the claims surrounding the power of new media and information systems were. They did, however, also argue that the introduction of new communication platforms online, called information and communication technologies (ICT), provided no guarantees that citizens would have a voice that would be listened to by political authorities. Guthrie and Dutton (1996:270) write that:

…the technical features and normative frameworks tied to computer-based communication networks could have a systematic influence on the content of interpersonal and group communication, which therefore might merit unique regulatory approaches.

Guthrie and Dutton thus argued that these new online platforms would be important places for communities to engage and interact, but that the government should create regulations to ensure that the communication that happened online did not lead to anti-governmental movements. In their case studies they indicated that the normative framework would inevitably include very different political views that ranged from civil libertarian to communitarian, to the views of those advocating protection of property rights.

He took the argument further and stated that if these regulations were in place then there could be the potential for ‘real world’ democracy to be translated into online

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democracy, stating that: “…the public should be able to conduct meetings in cyberspace in ways that are as civil and democratic as in the real world” (Guthrie and Dutton, 1996:288).

From Guthrie and Dutton’s argument about possible regulation to ensure effective communication there have been other writers who have also examined the possible potential of online democracy and deliberation and suggested that, even without regulation or control, the online space created the opportunity for communication between the candidates and electorate to develop from a monologue to a dialogue. One such writer is Stephen Coleman (2005:177) who noted that: “…digitally-mediated direct representation could provide a basis for a more dialogical and deliberative democracy in place of the dialogue of the deaf which tends to characterize contemporary political representation”.

Peter Dahlgren (2001, 2005) also saw that the Internet had become a much more open and creative place than his predecessors had predicted. This meant that he agreed with Coleman on the evolution that would be able to take place regarding deliberation in that online space, but that this would only form part of the greater environment. Dahlgren accurately wrote that even though the Internet could be destabilising for some aspects of democracy, the true value would be that the public would now be able to debate topics and viewpoints in an open and safe space where any member of the public would feel safe to introduce new thoughts and encourage diversity, which is a necessary element of any healthy democracy. He drew this insight from the growth he had witnessed in online communities such as Facebook and MySpace where people were actively sharing and engaging around new ideas and opinions. Phillips and Young (2009) were equally excited about the possibilities that the Internet presented for politics when they wrote:

…success in politics is now highly influenced by the online activities of political institutions. On this platform, they can exchange views on the latest political developments or hot topics, inviting the public and citizens to comment and adhere to their political programs. As a potential way of

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escaping the “top-down” politics of mass democracy in which political parties make policies with low-level participation or citizens’ involvement, the web provides means for high differentiation of political information and ideas, and (at least) theoretical possibilities of participation and high level of involvement in negotiations and feedback between leaders and followers (Phillips and Young, 2009:88).

It is clear the conversation regarding new media and the Internet has developed considerably over the past ten years, from being quite sceptical at first to very optimistic. The reality of how it translated into actual effective communication by citizens has been less impressive, however. In the past few years the Internet has been used in political campaigns to spread messages, inform and engage voters. But, as Chadwick noted in 2009: “…the use of digital network technologies to shape public policy is generally met with incredulity by most politicians, public servants, and citizens” (Chadwick, 2009:12).

Public interest in politics can be limited (political dealignment) and the online realm can be envisaged as a place to “have fun” and to “pass the time” (Curran, 2012:14). It has been noted that citizens only become active in politics during campaign periods when they believe that their involvement would change the outcome of an election, as was seen in the 2008 presidential election in the United States.

Lax also notes that a significant limitation to online involvement is the lack of interest of the electors (Lax, 2004:226). Even if they have access to the Internet it does not mean that they will spend time engaging in political debate, because most people simply do not bother.

As a whole, it is their belief that the Internet has not fundamentally changed the nature of political action (Hindman, 2009). It only provides tools that empower people to have more direct, constant, and personal participation in the formal political process, if they want to. Besides, as Nielsen (2011) also realised, “mundane Internet tools” such as Facebook, Twitter, and email are more deeply integrated into mobilizing practices in political campaigns than emerging and specialised ones, since its ubiquity attests to their importance.

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The growth of network societies online, where there is access to chat rooms, forums and community driven conversation instead of single portals that directed the conversation to the masses, means that the scepticism of a controlled information society has fallen away in most countries where Internet access is unregulated. The reality is that most people are more interested in discussing, sharing and building than they are in undermining the existing status quo.

The same also holds true for the impact new media has had on politics, where the fear that new media would greatly sway the outcome of an election was put to rest. One writer to conclude this was Phil Agre (2002), whose synthesis of research on the contribution of network technologies to participation in democratic decision-making suggests that they are more likely to amplify existing tendencies and opportunities for political action and participation than to give rise to wholly new ones.

This amplification is mostly due to the way the online space is constructed, with most individuals spending the greatest amount of their time on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and not on political or even media websites. This means that the way information is found and consumed has changed dramatically and that a new form of content creation has been made possible for the individual. Anyone can be active in the content creation process and the user of new media can stop being dependent on an info-communication hierarchy, giving them the power to find and consume the content that interests them. As producers of online content, the active participants become, consequently, leaders of opinion and creators of noise and buzz, that is, of word of mouth.

This shift has been away from traditional media, where there was a one-to-many experience, to a many-to-many experience, which makes it possible for users to contribute to web-content development, rate, collaboration, and distribution, as well as to customise web applications. This move has created what can be defined as the “participative web” that allows, for instance, for the effective participation of common web users and gives a place to user generated content: that is, to content made publicly available over the web, created outside professional routines and practices, using a variable amount of creativity, and which can be shared among Internet users at an increasing speed thanks to broadband availability. Users that

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create content are motivated by factors that include peer interrelation, the pursuit of fame, notoriety, and self-expression. As a consequence, the web is seen as an open platform, enriching diversity of opinion and the free flow of information that otherwise would not be available to citizens.

This “participatory web” does create a series of tensions in the concept of “public sphere”. According to Ingrid Volkmer, “public sphere” is defined as a process through which public communication becomes restructured and partly disembedded from national political and cultural institutions. This trend of the globalised public sphere is not only as a geographical expansion from a nation to worldwide, but also changes the relationship between the public, the media and state (Volkmer, 1999:123).

“Virtual communities” are being established online and transcend geographical boundaries, eliminating social restrictions. Howard Rheingold (2000) describes these globalised societies as self-defined networks, which resemble what people do in real life.

People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk (Rheingold, 2000).

For Sherry Turkle “making the computer into a second self, finding a soul in the machine, can substitute for human relationships” (Holmes, 2005:184). New media has the ability to connect like-minded others worldwide.

This change in the way society communicates and shares experiences and content means that there now exists a hybrid media model where the traditional channels such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio are amplified on the Internet and vice versa. The world of political communication, campaigning and mobilisation has also been affected by this change. In an attempt to describe the current state of the media system, it is observed that there are “interactions between old media and new media, and their associated technologies, genres, norms, behaviours, and organizations”. This